


A Different Beginning

by lily8007



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Red Hood: Lost Days
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-16 02:34:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19308871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lily8007/pseuds/lily8007
Summary: How much would change if Talia followed Jason, instead of pushing him off a cliff toward safety?  If he didn't have to come to terms with his death and resurrection alone?  If someone, for once in his whole life, risked everything to save him?This fills the prompt "chosen family" for Trope Bingo Round Twelve.  And with this fic, I have achieved blackout bingo!





	A Different Beginning

Jason clawed his way out of the Lazarus Pit, his lungs burning, every muscle trembling with pain and shock.  The weirdly chemical stench of death overlaid with jasmine stung his nose as he gasped and retched. He yelped a question, not understanding what was happening or where he was, and behind him Ra’s al Ghul roared an answer: “A deceitful child has spurned her father!”

The insane rage in his voice sparked terror in Jay’s heart, but he looked up to see Talia, holding out her hand for him.  “Trust me,” she said, and “Hurry, we must go,” so he let her yank him to his feet and they fled, together.

Jay skidded to a halt at the waterfall, and Talia caught his shoulder.  “It’s the only way!” she insisted, shoving a survival pack into his arms.  “I’ll be right behind you!”

The drop was terrifying.  Jason reeled back, instinctively trying to escape, and Talia shoved him.  Hard. He went over the edge, flailing, the darkness and roaring water swallowing him.

 

…

 

Somehow, he lived.  Somehow, he dragged himself out of the river, and got moving, downstream.  By then, the only thought in Jay’s mind was _escape_.  He staggered, his nerves firing with random bursts of pain or numbness, his head aching, a wild storm of rage and fear racing around and around in his chest.

Training saved him.  It was second nature to cover his tracks, and despite his complaints about not needing wilderness survival tactics in the middle of _Gotham City_ , Bruce had insisted he learn how to cope.  So he left no trail, and when he began to feel a little safer, he started looking for shelter.

Slowing down might’ve been a mistake, he realized, as he heard Talia’s voice behind him, calling his name.  She’d slipped up silently as the assassin she was, and Jay whirled, dropping into a defensive crouch. No weapons, he hadn’t even checked the survival bag  for a knife, and his eyes darted wildly around.

“Relax, Jason,” Talia murmured soothingly, holding up her empty hands.  “What you are feeling now is Lazarus fever. It causes paranoia and aggression.  But I am not your enemy.”

“Prove it,” he snarled, his heart thundering.

She smiled at him, gently.  Sadly.  And that expression whispered an echo in his mind, not quite clear enough to be memory, yet still he knew it.  “I have cared for you as a mother this last year.  I have just risked my life to give yours back to you - for surely my father will kill us both if he finds us, gripped by the same rage you feel.  Think, Jason. Does that sound like an enemy?”

He had … to call them ‘memories’ was ridiculous.  Flashes of images, sounds. Her face, her voice. And despite the howling maelstrom of pain and fear and anger in his gut, something else in him heard her speaking and said, _Trust her_.

Jay relaxed his guard slightly, though his gaze was still wary.  “Fine. I assume you have a plan in all this?”

“We have several possible escape routes, but none of them allow us to stand by the river they _know_ we leapt into,” Talia said.  “Come on. We must put many more miles behind us before we can rest.”

She knew the area - Jay didn’t even know where he was.  And honestly, despite the random aches from nerves reconnecting, he felt like he could run all night.  “Let’s go, then. Lead on.”

 

* * *

 

 

By the time they finally stopped, Jay was exhausted.  They hadn’t talked, Talia setting a grueling pace that left him no breath for questions.  Not even when she turned away from the river and led him damn near straight up a knife-edge ridge.  The land on the other side was if anything even wilder than what he’d trekked through at first.

When she called a halt, he just sagged to the ground, not worried about food or water or anything else.  Talia opened the survival pack, pushed a protein bar into his hands, and coaxed him to drink from the water cleverly stored in a bag inside the pack.

Jay was feeling a little refreshed when she sat down beside him and started taking her boots off.  “Where are we, anyway?” he asked rustily.

“Nepal,” Talia replied.  “The refuge where we were staying is called Nanda Parbat.  A day’s march will take us across another ridge, to a village where we can get a ride to the airport without too many questions.”

Nodding tiredly, Jay asked, “What’re the odds of your dad’s people catching up to us?”

“We left a trail along the river, which would have brought us out to the nearest village by now,” she explained.  “Hopefully they will assume I was in a hurry, and went there, instead of taking this circuitous route through the mountains.  If not, I won’t be taken alive. Being slain here is much preferable to being returned to my father’s custody after having defied him so.”

She said that calmly, and Jay just looked at her for a long moment.  “Why?” he finally blurted out. “Why would you risk death, or worse, for _me_?”

Talia just gave him a tired smile.  “Why _wouldn’t_ I?  You deserve better than the fate the world handed you.”  

“I still don’t know everything that happened,” he admitted.

Talia grew wary.  “What _do_ you remember?”

Jay shuddered.  “Dying. Trying to save Sheila - my bio mom.  I found her. But she was working for Joker. She turned me over to him, he…”

“I know,” Talia murmured when he faltered.  “He is a vicious brute. Some might call him an animal, but animals are not wantonly cruel.”

“I remember him leaving her next to the bomb,” Jay continued, his voice hoarse.  “Thinking I could get us both out, save her even if I wasn’t … wasn’t gonna make it.  I was wrong. I don’t remember … the end. Just … trying.”

“Your last act in this world was trying to save someone else,” Talia told him.  “That says a great deal about who you are, Jason. Even if I did not know you, even if I did not know all of the other amazing things you’ve done, you would deserve a chance at life for that alone.”

“After I … died,” Jay said, and swallowed, the words heavy.  “I don’t remember much at all. It’s all foggy.”

Talia nodded.  “We don’t know how you came back.  We heard reports, sightings, in Gotham.  So we sent men to investigate, and found you living on the street.  You were … you had a serious brain injury. You could not speak, you reacted to sound but understood nothing.  You fought, when they tried to bring you in, but you were homeless and near-starving. Our doctors did their best for you, and … while you were under observation, you would eat without prompting, and sleep when you were tired.  But you never spoke. You would walk wherever you were led, and simply stand where you had been left. They thought it was hopeless, that you were beyond saving.”

He shivered again, not just from the bleak story she told.  Now that they’d stopped moving, he started to feel the chill.  Talia saw it, reached into the survival bag, and took out a square of what he’d thought was foil.  She unfolded it into a mylar blanket, and wrapped it around his shoulders.

“Thanks,” Jay murmured.  “Aren’t you cold, too?”

“I’m slightly more acclimated than you are,” she replied, but she’d brought a survival bag too, and wrapped herself in her own blanket.  The thin mylar seemed like it’d be totally inadequate, but its reflective surface trapped Jay’s body heat pretty well.

“So you did something to fix me,” Jay said.

Talia sighed, and looked off in the distance.  When she spoke, it was with reluctance. “I was the only one who believed you were still _you_.  That it would be possible to save you somehow.  There were signs … you reacted when I spoke of Bruce.  And you behaved differently with me than you did with our guards.  I took that as proof that your mind, your soul, had survived.”

Jay nodded, and she continued, “My father disagreed.  He thought I was wasting my time. He would have sent you off to some institution, to be treated as breathing vegetable until the end of your days.  I … could not allow that. It seems to me that doing so would have been condemning you to living death. And so, when he went to the Lazarus Pit that rejuvenates him and prolongs his life, I brought you down in secret.  The Pit can restore any damage, even reverse death.” She paused, looking at him critically. “You have no scars any longer. And I even think you are taller, now.”

Icy chills ran up and down his back.  Bruce had spoken of the Lazarus Pit only as some foul means of immortality that had driven Ra’s al Ghul insane.  And Talia had put _him_ into it?

Thinking about being _dead_ was bad.  Thinking about being brain-damaged, no matter what flickers of hope Talia had seen, was worse.  All those hazy memories, the familiar sound of her voice, it came from a whole year when he’d been a mere shell of himself.  Losing his scars and coming back taller than he had been? That was some Frankenstein-level bullshit. Jay found the whole concept horrifying.

“What about Gotham?” he asked.  “What happened to everyone there?”

“Bruce was … broken,” Talia admitted.  “He has never been the same. I tried to reach out to him, but he has no time for anything but his grief and his mission.”

“You didn’t send me back to him,” Jay said, wondering why.

“As you were?  Of course not. I could not be so cruel,” Talia said.  “He mourned you, Jason. To return you to him alive, but so fundamentally damaged … it broke my heart, to see you in that state.  His was already shattered. No, I never even told him you were alive. Not until I knew your mind could be restored.”

And then he asked the question that had been prodding at the back of his brain since he first came back to himself, with memories of a crowbar coming down out of the dark to break bones and pulp muscle.  “What happened to Joker?”

Talia went very still and silent.  “Jason … it is late, we have had a long day, perhaps it would be best to cover such things tomorrow.”

But he already knew.  He _knew_.  “He’s still alive, isn’t he?   _Isn’t he,_ Talia?!”

She took a deep breath, and let it out in a sigh.  “Yes.”

He stood up, flinging the blanket off, rage storming in his chest.  It hurt worse than trying to breathe with broken ribs. “No matter what he does, no matter who he hurts, who he _kills_ , Bruce can’t bring himself to do it.  His antiquated morality is more important to him than stopping that bastard.  More important to him than me!”

“Jason, no, it wasn’t…” Talia began, standing up.

Jay whirled on her.  “No! Don’t make excuses for him!  He let me die, and he couldn’t even take out the sonofabitch who murdered me!  I’m gonna _kill_ him for this!   _He let me_ **_die_** _!_ ”

There was so much anger, all of it focused on Bruce, and the clown, spilling over into hatred of them and himself and hell, maybe Talia, too.  Maybe she should have left him alone, let him live as a vegetable, let him die somewhere without ever having to remember and know and feel such pain.  Jay seized handfuls of his hair and yanked, screaming in frustration. He wanted to hit something, _kill_ something, and it never occurred to him to wonder if this was the Lazarus fever she’d told him about.  From the inside, it felt perfectly justified.

Talia caught his arm, trying to calm him down, and from the depths of despair Jay lashed out at her.  She didn’t even dodge, and the shock in her eyes when his fist connected with her shoulder engraved itself into the chaos whirling in his mind.

The very next instant, Jay was laid out flat on the ground, his arm frozen in a very effective joint lock.  “I will not let you harm yourself,” Talia told him, her voice stern. “But I am also disinclined to let you hurt me.”

At finding himself restrained, the rage flaring like a cloud of flammable gas when a spark struck it - and then vanishing, remembering her expression, the anger burnt off as swiftly as it had risen.  Jay breathed raggedly, left only with the pain, and he was only fifteen, after all. Just a boy who’d wanted to be Robin, wanted to save people, to do something _good_ with his life, and all he got for it was an ugly death and a resurrection full of nightmares.

His breath hitched as he tried not to cry, and Talia let him go, gathering him close to her.  “Hush, habibi, it’s the Lazarus fever. You’re going to be all right,” she murmured, rubbing his back.  Jay gave in and sobbed against her shoulder.

Still, way down deep inside him, a coal burned.   _Kill him for this.  Kill_ **_both_ ** _of them for this.  The Bat, and the Clown.  They served you death, let them taste how bitter it is._

 

* * *

 

Jay woke up, wrapped in both blankets and Talia’s arms.  She was speaking softly to him, telling him they had to get going, and he reluctantly uncurled from the little hollow they’d stopped in to rest last night.  

They didn’t have much food, just the protein bars, but at least there was water.  With a few morning necessities taken care of, they set out again, Talia in the lead.  “I hope you’re ready for a hike,” she warned. “We need to get across that ridge.” She turned to nod in the direction they were going, and Jay’s heart dropped.

“Is that snow?” he asked.  “And can we really get over that today?”

“It is.  We won’t be that high for long, and we’ll cross it at the warmest part of the day,” Talia explained.  “The village is in the valley on the other side. But it is going to be a scramble. They’ll be watching all the easy routes.”

And so he spent the day thinking that running across rooftops was a whole lot easier than climbing mountains.  Talia seemed tireless, and incredibly sure-footed; once or twice Jay nearly stumbled on the stony ground as they went higher.

He felt exposed, up near the top of the ridge, with little vegetation around them.  Just a few scrubby trees and spindly plants with tiny, beautiful flowers. At least they had sunlight and even some birds singing to make it less of a slog.  Jay panted and struggled, glad that Talia knew what the hell she was doing out here. It was a far cry from any place he’d ever known.

As the day wore on, he fell into a haze, just watching the ground to make sure of his footing, glancing up every few seconds to keep Talia in sight.  And then, in a little decline below the peak of the ridge, she halted so abruptly that he almost ran into her.

“What…?” he started to ask, and she hissed him to silence, holding up one hand.  Talia looked around carefully, and Jay did too, wondering what had stopped her.

He noticed the silence first.  The birds were gone, and in general the place just felt too quiet.  It made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and he looked to Talia worriedly.  

She had a large curved dagger in her hand, and she was still scanning their surroundings.  “We’re not alone,” Talia breathed.

“Your dad’s men?” Jay whispered, falling into a defensive crouch and wishing for a weapon.

“No, they would have attacked,” she replied in the same soft tone.  “However, this _is_ prime snow leopard habitat.”

Oh, _great_ , just what he needed.  To come back from the dead and be eaten by a damn _leopard_.  Jay wanted to scoff, but silence seemed important, and he looked around just as intently as Talia was.  “Should we go back?”

“It might be behind us,” she whispered.

In the privacy of his own mind, Jay swore, turning so that they stood back to back.  At least nothing could creep up on them, even if the best _he_ could do at the moment was pick up a rock.

 _Movement._  Jay tensed, staring.  He’d seen something move, a dozen yards away, in the lee of a big gray rock.  There was a tiny tuft of grass there, and he thought it might have just moved in the wind.  Still, he stared at it intently.

The rocky ground behind the grass … _blinked_.  That was how it looked to Jay, until his brain made sense of what he was seeing.  Those weren’t pebbles, they were dark spots on gray fur the same color as the rocks.  He saw the leopard, and drew in breath to shout, hoping to scare it off…

… but it was tiny, and fluffy, and its eyes were huge, staring at _him_ in obvious horror.  Jay let out his breath in a laugh.  “Look, it’s just a kitten.” And he took a step forward, just to straighten up from the strain of fear.

Talia turned even as he moved, and things happened _very_ fast.  The leopard cub flattened itself to the ground, ears laid back, and Jay smiled, thinking it was cute.  

That was when a full-grown leopard came around the rock, snarling, her fur standing on end, and charged at Jay.

He tried to jump back, but the loose shale underfoot just dumped him on his ass, with death still staring him in the face.  Those teeth looked a _lot_ bigger than they should’ve been, bright white against the cat’s black lips and red tongue, and that absurd thought was gonna be the last thing to cross his mind before the leopard ripped his throat out.

Except Talia was between him and death, again, her knife a blur of steel, and she lunged _toward_ the leopard with a war-cry.  Both of them froze, the cat crouched to spring, Talia poised to strike, and for a long silent moment they just stared at one another.  Jay could only watch, forgetting to breathe.

As quickly as she’d appeared, the leopard turned and vanished, the cub following.  Talia straightened up, sheathed her knife, and let out a long sigh. “Holy shit,” Jay muttered.

Talia turned with a rueful expression, and held out her hand to help him up.  “Jason, this is true of all wild beasts: wherever there is a cub, there is almost always a very protective mother nearby.”

He stood up, still shaken by the encounter, and looked at the spot where the cats had been.  “Gotcha. The cuter something is, the more _dangerous_ it is, because the more pissed off its momma will be if you mess with it.”

“Essentially, yes,” Talia said.  “Are you hurt?”

“No, just shook up,” he replied.  And then he looked at her thoughtfully.  “How come it didn’t attack you?”

Talia’s lips quirked in a wry smile.  “Oh, she and I understood one another perfectly.  Come on, we have miles yet to go.”

He shrugged the survival bag higher on his shoulders, and followed her into his new life.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I normally ship these two characters as a couple, but Talia's feelings for Jay during Lost Days do read as quite maternal. So I figured, for the challenge of it, I'd try to write them as mother and son.
> 
> It worked well enough that I'm seriously considering continuing this story. The first chapter was _intended_ to be the whole thing, but I may add to it later on. Feel free to subscribe to the story, or to me.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has commented and given kudos on my stories these last couple months. Your encouragement is very welcome, and helped me get this challenge done.


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